Nokia Sues Apple Over iPhone

Nokia has announced that it is suing Apple for patents it claims were violated by the phenomenally successful iPhone.

Nokia is claiming that Apple’s hot smartphone is in violation of fully ten of its patents, which cover the variously broad areas of GSM, UMTS and Wi-Fi. The real question on all of this is just why Nokia has let the iPhone slide on so many egregious patent infringements since its launch two years ago… It’ll be interesting to see how the iPod Touch is handled in this case, since the only one of these technologies it actually uses would appear to be Wi-Fi.

BusinessWeek’s report on the litigation makes some very interesting points indeed, and some that highlight just why Apple might have ended up in the position it’s in, including the fact that Nokia has said that around 40 companies have entered license agreements for its 3G technologies. Apple, of course, not being a cellular phone manufacturer before the iPhone, isn’t one of the companies with a license.

Naturally it’s been suggested that, since Nokia’s financial situation has been relatively well known to be shaky this year (with some reports indicating that it’s seeing profits down by as much as 66%), the Finnish phone giant might well be being a touch optimistic in the hopes that it can wrest some of Apple’s practical mountain of smartphone money from it.

We’ll have to see how it all works out, but since this is one of those patent cases where both of the parties involved are massive companies capable of throwing almost limitless money at the case, it seems likely that it’ll go on for literally years, as with the Immersion case against Sony (which eventually kind of led to the PlayStation 3’s lack of force-feedback at launch).